Unpleasantness

It’s one of the areas of working in IT, specifically on the helpdesk, that no one ever prepares you for. They don’t cover it in the tech magazines, they don’t talk about it on tech podcasts, and you don’t hear much about it when you’re training for your career, but at some point, you will have to do it. You will be asked to look into something, and figure out why something doesn’t work, and you’ll discover what it is, and then you’ll have to fix it.

Fixing it will involve taking that information and presenting it to the one person you don’t want to. You will have to go talk to a coworker, one you like and get along with, one who works as hard as anyone you’ve ever known, and you will have to tell them that they made a mistake.

You will have to look someone dead in the eye, who has poured their heart and soul into a project, and tell them they did it wrong.

It sucks.

But then, you get to help them correct the problem, you get to work side by side with them, guiding them to learning how not to make the same mistake again, and if you’re really good, you get to help turn their mistake into a minor problem and a thing of the past, quickly.

That doesn’t suck.

Technorati tags: Mistakes, Helpdesk

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